Two years ago, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against Sci-Hub, Libgen and several related "pirate" sites.

The publisher accused the websites of making academic papers widely available to the public, without permission.

While Sci-Hub and Libgen are nothing like the average pirate site, they are just as illegal according to Elsevier's legal team, which swiftly obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court.

The injunction ordered Sci-Hub's founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who is the only named defendant, to quit offering access to any Elsevier content. This didn't happen, however.

Sci-Hub and the other websites lost control over several domain names, but were quick to bounce back. They remain operational today and have no intention of shutting down, despite pressure from the Court.

This prompted Elsevier to request a default judgment and a permanent injunction against the Sci-Hub and Libgen defendants. In a motion filed this week, Elsevier's legal team describes the sites as pirate havens.

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The darknet is where you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. An article by Kaveh Waddell over at The Atlantic describes how you can not only access illegal drugs, weapons, and other nefarious materials, but this now includes scientific research papers. Following Elsevier's successful crackdown and dissolution of Sci-Hub, the site owner, Alexandra Elbakyan, has moved it to the darknet.

There will always be techniques for accessing paywalled research for free, even without services like Sci-Hub. Some of them are much less complex than Elbakyan's website: Researchers and scholars often use the hashtag #icanhazpdf on Twitter to ask fellow academics for paywalled articles. (There's even been scholarly work published that analyzes the phenomenon—appropriately, the research is free online.)

But Sci-Hub's ingenious methods automate the process, cut out middle men on Twitter, and don't advertise the request for, essentially, pirated research. And Elbakyan says her website's presence on the dark web will help keep it accessible even if legal action dismantles Sci-Hub's new home on the easily accessible surface web.

The New York Times has an opinion piece about Open Access publishing. It starts with the case of Alexandra Elbakyan a guerilla open access activist who is on the lam from the US government acting on behalf of the copyright cartel. Pricing and other restrictions put many journals out of reach of all but the few researchers at major, well-funded universities in developed nations. The large publishing companies usually have profit margins over 30% and subscription prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care, which itself is priced insanely, over the past two decades, so there appears to be a real scandal there. Several options are available including pre-print repositories and various open access journals. The latter require the author to pay up front for publishing. However, the real onus lies on the communities' leaders, like heads of institutions and presidents of universities, who are in a position to change which journals are perceived as high-impact.

A young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world's best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It's time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker - tale of the late Aaron Swartz

In 2016, the tale has new life. The Washington Post decries it as academic research's Napster moment, and it all stems from a 27-year-old bio-engineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan (who's living in Russia).

Just as Swartz did, this hacker is freeing tens of millions of research articles from paywalls, metaphorically hoisting a middle finger to the academic publishing industry, which, by the way, has again reacted with labels like "hacker" and "criminal."

Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the developer of Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It's a portal that offers free and searchable access "to most publishers, especially well-known ones." Search for it, download, and you're done. It's that easy.

How do you think this will turn out?

[Ed. addition] The Washington Post article elaborates:

Sci-Hub connects to a database of stolen papers. If a user requests a paper in that database, Sci-Hub serves it up. If the paper is not there, Sci-Hub uses library passwords it has collected to find a paper, provides it to the searcher, then dumps the paper in the database. The site can be clunky to use, often sending users to Web pages in foreign languages.

Elbakyan and her supporters have said the passwords were donated by those sympathetic to her cause. But she also acknowledges that some passwords were obtained using the kind of phishing methods that hackers use to dupe people out of financial information.

"It may be well possible that phished passwords ended up being used at Sci-Hub," she said. "I did not send any phishing emails to anyone myself. The exact source of the passwords was never personally important to me."

One of the world's largest science publishers, Elsevier, won a default legal judgement on 21 June against websites that provide illicit access to tens of millions of research papers and books. A New York district court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis (LibGen) project and related sites.

In May, Elsevier gave the court a list of 100 articles illicitly made available by Sci-Hub and LibGen, and asked for a permanent injunction and damages totalling $15 million. The Dutch publishing giant holds the copyrights for the largest share of the roughly 28 million papers downloaded from Sci-Hub over 6 months in 2016, followed by Springer Nature and Wiley-Blackwell. (Nature is published by Springer Nature, and Nature's news and comment team is editorially independent of the publisher.) According to a recent analysis, almost 50% of articles requested from Sci-Hub are published by these three companies1.

Re:Out of reach.. suck it up(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @04:57PM

Travel is unnecessary in the information age when every homeless bum living under a bridge can send a message anywhere in the world. I think I'll stay under the bridge today as it's cloudy and rainy and I don't feel like walking.

Re:Out of reach.. suck it upRe:Out of reach.. suck it up(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday May 19, @05:09PM
(3 children)

As long as she stays in Russia and/or Kazakhstan she should be fairly safe from the reaches of Evilvier, if she is ever going to go on some academic or personal trip to (western) Europe or the USA then their might be some issues.

That said I recall this being a previous topic of Soylent and when I looked thru the sites (Sci-Hub and Libgen) they where full of other, as in non academic papers, such as various books (both scanned and ebooks), comics and such. I have no idea if that has been addressed or not. That said Evilvier doesn't give a shit of there was an entire collection of Hellboy comics etc or the latest books from O'Reilly etc there. But still it did contain other things.

Re:Out of reach.. suck it up(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 19, @05:21PM

If they wanted to split off the academic papers database, it should be pretty easy. The same papers may be accessible on multiple sites, some of which might not offer ebooks and comics. As you said, Elsevier only cares about the science papers.

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Re:Progress(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 20, @05:08AM

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Re:Progress(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Friday May 19, @05:24PM

2017: If I have seen further how to monopolize the future it is by standing on the shoulders of fat donations from self serving people that make plebs pay taxes and then pay for the fruits of invested tax again.

"1676: If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

The bitter fight claiming Leibnitz plagiarized him doesn't fit terribly well with that. Newton's giants seem to be those who were safely dead rather than anyone who might dare to dilute his reputation.

In defense of Elsevier(Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Friday May 19, @05:24PM

In the billions upon trillions upon quadrillions upon quintillions of hypothetical different resolved quantum states of the universe, I'm sure there's at least one where there's a more pointless rent-seeking publishing company, with even more suspect journals involved in cash-for-skipping-peer-review scandals.

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Value of holdings(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @06:02PM

soon, apps like sci-hub will be rebuilt as anonymous dapps using block chain tech. founders/maintainers could be paid with certain trace resistant crypto currencies. all the court orders in the world wouldn't be able to take down shit. also, 15 million buys a lot of dead copyright trolls. these targets show a lot of restraint.

That's an extremely good question. Although there is a theory that AES might not be vulnerable after all. Meaning that AES can scale faster than quantum computers can scale, and at much cheaper costs.

It may be better to move to purely anonymous forms of mass communication. Maintainers (IT) are not necessary. Design the system from the beginning to be a small device, that can be hidden surreptitiously, for users to access data. In order to access the data at all you must be contributing to the system in a decentralized anonymous peering network.

That is most likely "immune" to quantum attacks IF the devices have their "last mile" as wireless. Even better with mesh networks that can have users at low bandwidth communicating for 10-15 miles easy. Whether or not quantum attacks succeed, it will be exceedingly difficult to name these people in a lawsuit. The FCC (remember Pump Up The Volume?) would need to track down the devices with triangulation, and you would need an expert testifying for each person to prove relationships between users and devices.

The final step is using wireless steering technologies to connect with multiple other peers at the 10-15 mile range, randomly load balance across them, and have the "router" devices attached to a drone :)

If a quantum attack against the block chain is possible, then it also stands to reason that almost all other forms of cryptographic signatures are vulnerable to. In that case, the only answer is quantum devices that use quantum principles to lock information into a "domain" that can only be accessed with specific attributes of the user. Unfortunately, I don't even know of any that are theorized, much less their abilities to perform key exchange and transmit attributes to other users remotely.

Yeah, quantum encryption and vaults are the only answer to quantum cryptanalysis performed against traditional public key and block chain technologies.

If a quantum attack against the block chain is possible, then it also stands to reason that almost all other forms of cryptographic signatures are vulnerable to. In that case, the only answer is quantum devices that use quantum principles to lock information into a "domain" that can only be accessed with specific attributes of the user. Unfortunately, I don't even know of any that are theorized, much less their abilities to perform key exchange and transmit attributes to other users remotely.

No, there's classical public-key encryption methods that should be able to resist quantum attacks.

So yes, most current algorithms are probably vulnerable, but we can fix that without needing full quantum encryption tech. Which is great news since the bad guys are probably gonna have quantum computers long before we do...